Business One In Progress

It's been just over half a year into BC's integration with Adobe and we're beginning to see some exciting synergy both from a business and an engineering perspective between the pre-existing BC team and the Adobe Group.

So far our top priority over the last 6 months have been to stabilize the existing business and prepare for the growth we need to be successful. To put things in perspective:

• BC's new European data center went live this morning. What this means for you is all new sites created in Europe will now be hosted on the new data center for improved performance. Combined with the new North America data center this means we've had major wins in capacity expansion with 2 out of 3 planned new data centers now online. We will be following up with the Asia Pacific data center (based in Sydney, Australia) targeted to come online by the end of June.
• In terms of product improvements we've replaced Sitewalk with In-Context Editing, delivered a new Extension for Dreamweaver and added FTP access to site-wide templates and module layouts.
• Our engineering team has invested heavily on improving system stability and reliability 'under the hood' with more work to come in this area.

Now that we've achieved some integration milestones, improved system stability and ramped up our development team we will be shifting our priorities on 3 major development tracks over the remainder of 2010.

Features for Customer Satisfaction

In the next few releases we're going to deliver 5 major features driven by the most popular wishlist requests. These will include:

1. DNS Management Tools so you can create sub-domains for your site, redirect your www records to your non-www records, in general give you greater control over your sites DNS records (A, C, MX, TXT).
2. Customizable URLs for products, catalogs, web-app items and blog posts to improve SEO. URLs will be editable from the root folder level. We'll then extend this URL system to cover all other content modules.
3. Allowing Modules to be Rendered inside Content Holders so you can place lists of web-app items, catalogs, literature items, webforms and much more inside a repeatable content region that you can place on different parts of your sites.
4. Adding a Workflow Notification Editor To Your Partner Portal so you can customize the workflow notifications that are sent from your partner portal to your clients when they receive orders, webform submissions and other workflow triggers.
5. Integrating Custom CRM Fields with the Webform Builder - when you extend your customer database with custom fields these will be made available in the webform builder so that you can create forms to collect details directly into the extended CRM forms and allow your customers to login to a secure zone to update them again.

Data Center Migration

Now that all of our new Adobe data centers are on track to be online by end June the focus turns to migrating customers from the pre-existing BC data centers. Some of you may be thinking: "Why didn't they just copy the entire database?". By looking at this from a long-term perspective it's a better investment of resources to build the tools that will enable you to migrate your own sites from one data center to another at the click of a button.

This is because building site migration tools gives us the software architecture to also build site backup tools and following on from that we will develop the ability for partners to download sites as 'BC template zip files' and sell them to customers who can then load them onto their own sites. We'll be rolling these out over the rest of 2010 starting with a pilot program to migrate some sites in July as the quality assurance effort involved with site migration will be tremendous. I will be blogging more about the site migration program over the next couple of months.

Strategic Projects For the Long Term

To make sure we don't just build a faster horse, some of our development team will be devoted to projects that are contributing to further long-term integration with other Adobe products. Luckily for you these projects will have a tangible customer impact. For the remainder of the year they will be working on:

• Multiple Module Layouts - we will be providing the ability for web designers to specify multiple module layouts for blogs, web-apps, catalogs, products and more.
• APIs will be extended around the CMS capabilities of the system for example the ability to access Web Apps items via an API. Most modules will gain the ability to access a list (such as a list of announcements) or a single item. The aim is to extend our API to cover much more of the system and provide XML and JSON layers to give our partners the ability to integrate BC with a much wider range of 3rd party applications.

"Slow and Steady" wins the Race

Although we've got a number of new and exciting projects in the pipeline the underlying drive to improve system stability remains and any new features must pass a high quality bar before they can be released even in Beta. We will be taking a cautious approach to make sure service levels continue to improve hence progress will be slow and steady.

In spite of this we have been at Adobe for a little more than half a year now so we're working much more closely as a unit. Overall we feel confident about sticking to the plan and as we achieve the goals listed I will be happy to share more and more of the BC roadmap especially around the medium term blogs and e-commerce overhaul with our partner community.